Abstract

Sentences of natural languages are often said to express propositions and to have meanings . This work is about the nature of such entities and their role in an account of the truth conditions of tensed attributions of belief containing demonstratives and indexicals. ;In Chapter I, I discuss the temporal properties of propositions. Two views concerning the temporal properties of propositions--temporalism and eternalism--are characterized; eternalism is defended as the correct view. I show that the temporalist cannot give adequate truth conditions for tensed attributions of belief, and, in addition, that criticisms of eternalism made by David Kaplan are unfounded. I also show that, given the truth of eternalism, Kaplan's identification of sentence meaning with character must be rejected. ;Chapter II takes, as its point of departure, Kaplan's work on demonstratives. An account of the semantical properties of demonstratives and indexicals is presented, one based upon Kaplan's account, but modified in the light of the results of Chapter I. It is then argued, on the basis of this account, that the usual truth conditions accorded to attributions of belief are incorrect: I argue that an attribution of belief is not true simply if the person to whom belief is attributed believes the proposition expressed by the sentence used to attribute belief. ;In Chapter III, two recent attempts to deal with the problems raised in Chapter II are considered: The semantics for attributions of belief suggested by Robert Stalnaker and Bas C. van Fraassen. On Stalnaker's and van Fraassen's views, in attributing belief to a person u using a sentence S, we sometimes do not attribute to u a belief in the proposition expressed by S, but in some other proposition. Both accounts are shown to be unacceptable. ;Finally, in Chapter IV, a solution to the problems raised in Chapter II is proposed. I suggest that not only the proposition expressed by a sentence S, but the meaning of S, is involved in truth conditions for attributions of belief containing S. The work concludes with a formal development of this proposal